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Fifteen or so years ago I took time out from my musical degrees to study philosophy and there, found to my delight histories of thought dealing with all the esoterica that fed my musical inspiration. The nine Greek Muses, it was said, instilled in the creative human soul a quality of enthousiasmos that enabled all creation to occur. Our modern English word has evolved to mean eagerness, fervor, zeal, ardor, passion, when what it actually means is "god within you".
Ten years later, in a dusty old Amish barn north of Wooster, Ohio, I found a 3-volume set of The Book of Rosicruciae and thought I'd found the Holy Grail. Rosicrucians were a secret cult (much like the Freemasons with origins, some say, back to Alexander the Great) whose chief occupation was the preservation of knowledge across religious and ideological barriers stressing the oneness of all things. I was predisposed to this idea as it was also around this time that I'd written a work taking as its title, Gaea, the Greek view of Earth as mother of us all. Soon after playing it, one performer sent me the words of Chief Seattle set here in Anima Mundi.
Two years ago, while living in Hawaii, I decided to read the dictionary of philosophy cover
to cover. Yet no sooner had I begun than I discovered the entry:
anima mundi (Lat., the soul of the world) See panpsychism.
Foregoing the alphabet, I learned that panpsychism was the view that all parts of matter
involve consciousness. If the world produces living creatures, then it, too, must be living, possessing a world-soul. That afternoon, two years ago, I made a note in my workbook, alongside the old Chief Seattle quote I'd put there, the title Anima Mundi.
The dictionary defines anima as "soul, consciousness, life" (literally "air, breath"—an animal is, literally, a thing breathing). But panpsychism extends beyond animals to all objects in the universe—plants, stones and other, what we call, "inanimate" objects. Mundi is earth, so Anima Mundi is really "Living Earth," and the meaning I give to it in my musical work.
Then came a commission for "spiritual music" from the Nashville Chamber Orchestra. The word spiritual, I learned, means several things: sacred; religious; separate from bodily or worldly existence; conscious thoughts or emotions; the realm of things of the spirit, mind, or soul; and then one that really hit me—the divine influence as an agency working in the heart of man. Was this not the Muses and their enthousiasmos? Was this not the Rosicrucians and their Oneness? Was this not Anima Mundi, soul of the world, our "Living Earth"?
Today, science has a word for this—biodiversity, the interdependence of all things. I researched panpsychism and learned that the whole idea of world-soul came from Plato's book Timaeus wherein he reveals the harmony of the spheres as a model for restoring harmony in the human soul. Plato goes so far as to lay out a musical harmonic series, which I used in the chorus to open and close the work on the very words anima mundi. And it is this book of Plato's from which generations of great philosophers and humanitarians (many of them also Rosicrucians) have examined this concept and whose words I have set to music in this work.
Soon after assembling these various texts, in May 1998, I was invited to work in a cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains. As I unpacked, I noticed in my room, next to the bed, a framed text. I knew it before I'd crossed the room: "All things are bound together. All things connect..." —Chief Seattle.
J. Mark Scearce, 8/98
Hickory, North Carolina
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